138 THE, Sport TING SCE,NE, WHEN THA T APR.IL WITH ITS SHOWERS SWEE T S INCE the close of the Second \Vorld \Var, the Masters Tour- nament at Augusta, Georgia- the first unportant championship of the year-hds come to be regarded as a sort of golfers' equinox. Those of us who are fortunate enough to fly South to attend it each April usual1y find, as we stare out the plane window, that one of the reflexive exercises the mind eng<,lges in is to review the sea- son to cLlte. 1\;1 y conclusion this April (we 1l1USt helve been over North Car- 01in.:1 b then, for the color of the ground below was beginning to change from cinnamon to paprika) was that, to judge b the wInter tour, ] 967 should be an exceptionally interesting year. An awful lot was packed into those three months. Arnold Palmer demonstrated that he was on the stick again by winning two tournaments. ] ulius Boros also took two tour events, and this was noteworthy, because ùur- ing his eighteen years as a professional he had never before got that droning swing of his functioning so wen be- fore :May. The most arresting victory of an, though, was the one scored by Dan Sikes in the Jacksonville Open, for Sikes is a native of Jacksonville, and there is nothing more difficult in golf than to perform creditably, let alone win, in your own home town. A good deal of this tournament action was visi- ble on televiç;ion, and, along with showing us how the winners won, it brought us some other indelible mo- ments. F'or openers, there was I obert Goulet's ter- rapinesque progress up the eighteenth hole in the Bing Crosby Pro-Amateur, and, throughout the winter, the cheefIng e vi den c e that Doug Sanders, golf's an- swer to Twiggy, had been sending his effulgent ward- robe to cleaners who were treating it with proper re- spect-the off-orangE" outfit particularl}. (An aestheti- cally oriented friend of mine always switches over from his color television set to a sma]] auxiliary black- and-white set when SandLrs appears on the screen, but this is patently his problem, and not Sanders'. ) There was one other winter note of significance. ably the best run of all tournaments. The credit for this goes to Roberts, a New York investment banker, who, with Bob Jones, was a founder of the Augusta National Golf Club. Everything that pertains to the course is handled by Jones. All other matters fall into H..oberts' purview, and, in his persistent, perfectionist way, he has done a dazzling job. Certainly, when It comes to affording the spectatol s a chance to see what is going on, the Masters has been in a class by itself since its inception, in 1934. I remember standing behind the second green some twenty April" ago, craning my neck in an effort to see over three rows of spec- tators, and concluding that it wasn't worth the trouble. I crossed that green off as a viewing spot. The next year, however, a player I wanted to watch- young Middlecoff, I think it was-hap- pened to be putting on the second when I was in the neighborhood, and I de- cided to see what I could see It was lnystifying. 1"'here must have been eight rows of spectators in front of me, but I found that I had a clear view of the ac- tion. .Ltln older Augusta hand later solved this riddle by informing me that each year Roberts remodelled cer- tain natural vantage points so that they coulù dccommodate many more people. ()n the ground behind the second green, a large, biHowy mound had been constructed during the off- season. The change had es- caped me because the new mound not only was thick with grass but had been blended so nicely into the landscàpe that it looked as if it had always been there. ThIs is the hallmark of Roberts' modifications-the care with which they are done. This year, as IS my ann ual habit, I took a swing around the course on \Vednesday, the day hefore the start of the tournament. 'T'he course is closed for play then, in order to let the greenkeeplng cre\\ get in its final licks, so it is the perfect time to look around and try to spot the latest al- tera tions. This past year, Jones, after letting the course ride for several sea- sons, had made two not unimportan t changes: he ThIs was the announcement by Clif- ford Roberts, the general chairman of the Masters, that all the tickets for this year's event had been bought up by ] anuary 26th-the first time a golf tournament has ever been completely sold out so early . No official attendance figures are ever released on the Masters, but it has long been the best attended of our tournaments, and a conservative guess would put the number of patrons on each of the four days of play at something over twenty-five thousand. In recent years, the ganeries would have been substantiall} tlrger if Rob- erts, recognizing that a course can be- come too crowded for comfort, had not decided there would have to be a cutoff point. The one he established two years ago was to stop the sale of tickets each day as soon as the huge parking lots, which hold ten thousand cars, were fil1ed. 'rhis resulted in such a sizable increase in the advAnce ticket sale last year that all the tickets were gone by March 1 th. It is appropriate that the Masters should be making this kind of golf his- tory . To begin with, there is no inland course in all the world as lovely as the Augusta National, and though it clearly favors the long straight hitter over the short straigh t hitter, it has few peers as a test of all-round shotmaking skill. On top of this, the Masters is unquestion- o